Introduction

In this portfolio we are going to explore the differences between Japanese and Western game music. Since games have come a long way since the eighties not only with regards to game graphics and mechanics. But also in terms of music. In the early stages of videogames, in the eighties, games could not process more than three notes meaning it was not possible to write a tune with complex multi-layered melodies. Over time this changed. Now there is a sound engineering department and an orchestra. The two biggest producers of games over the years is Japan and the West. This is where the focus on this portfolio will be on. The main question is is there any differentiation between the two categories. The music used for this research is music from classic games such as Mario but also more modern games.So it is a mix between old, new and popular and unpopular games. The corpus exists of 50 Japanese and 50 Western songs. An expected division is that for Japanese games there are Japanese music composer, but for the game Death Stranding with songs such as The Drop it seems that there is a Western composer Ludvig Forssell.

src=“https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/2Gcw0OM0KSggHHvYCSqcaW?utm_source=generator”

Overview

This is a plot to have a quick overview using the Spotify API. In the x axis the key is displayed. 0 stands for C and 1 for C# and 2 for D and so forth.

There are no big differences in both categories seem pretty even. There is a bit of a difference in instrumentalness however, if you look at keys 3 and 6 which are D# and F# respectively it is noticeable that the instrumentallnes for Japanese music is pretty low. This means that only vocals are used.

The other major finding is that Western music overall tends to have a lower valence, which means the music is more negative, for example sad, angry or depressed.

Differences in statistics

In this plot the mean and the standard deviation in tempo are being compared. The mean tempo for Japanese music tend to be grouped between 120 and 150 BPM while Western music seems to be all over the place. For Western this seems also to be the case for the standard deviation. While for Japanese music the standard deviation is pretty low. Furthermore there seems there is no big difference between volume and duration.

Histogram of tempi

Here we see two density histogram plots from Japanese and Western game-music. As you can see Japanese game music has a mean around of 120 BPM. While Western game music has two peaks around 85 BPM and 120 BPM. When the distribution has two peaks it is called a bimodial distribution. This may mean that in the western hemisphere there are two measures of BPM that have the highest frequency. But 85 BPM may be a bit more popular. This explains why in the previous plot Western music seemed to be all over the place.

Differences in Timbre

This plot shows the average timbre coefficients in a violin plot.The coefficients are for both categories pretty similar. They are both spread out for c02. But that might also be the biggest distinction since the western violin plot is covers a bigger range which means that the probability is more spread out.

Dendogram Japanese and Western Games

This plot is a dendogram where there is a sample taken from each of the two playlists. But there does not seem to be a clear distinction between the two.

Classification

For these plots only twenty tracks for each playlist is used. Both precision and recall for the categories are pretty high. For Japanese games the precision is 85.7% and the recall is 90%. For Western games the precision is 89.5% and the recall is 85%. This means that there has to be some factor to which make a clear distinction between the two. If you look at the right plot you can see that the instrumentalness is a very big factor. This is something we already had some suspicions about in our overview in the beginning. When plotting some of the deciding factors, you can see that there can be some lines drawn based on acousticness and the c01 coefficient.

Comparing Chromagrams

For the next set of plots we look at some individual tracks instead of the whole playlist. For the chromagrams we use the tracks The Face of our new hope and the Drop both from the Japanese game Death Stranding but a Western composer named Ludvig Forssell. The other are the main theme song of Final Fantasy 7 remake and Hymn of the Fayth also from the Final Fantasy series.

In the face of our new hope the notes used are mainly Db and Ab. In the drop it is also mainly Db but also D. This means that probably all his songs are primarily in D or Db. The same is true for the Final Fantasy series. It seems that all of them use the D or Db note for the majority of the song. Of course it is a bit too rash to make a conclusion based on four samples only.

Timbre

In this plot we compare two classics from both worlds the classic Mario theme and the Crash Bandicoot theme. Both themes seem to have a constant presence of the c06 coefficient. Furthermore it is interesting to see that in the Mario theme, around 100 seconds, the melody changes and the energy transfers from c04 to c01. For the Crash Bandicoot theme the c04 is quite strong at the beginning that has probably to do with the strong beat at the beginning. Overall the two are quite dissimilar.

Self-similarity matrix

Moving on with the comparison from the two classics. In this case we compare them through self similarity matrices. In the Mario case, in the chroma plot, there seems to be segments of multiple diagonal lines around the 70 seconds mark, the 125 seconds mark and at the end. If you listen around these marks you notice that the melody changes significantly. These changes are also visible in the timbre ssm where around these parts the chunk is very dark blue which means that these parts are dissimilar in comparison to other parts.

In the timbre ssm for Crash Bandicoot there is a bright band along the axis this is because the same notes are playing throughout the song. Also around the thirty second mark it becomes very dark blue this is because the beat changes in that time frame.

Comparing Mario theme songs

Here we compared the classic Super Mario Bros theme song with the Super Mario 64 one. The song is the same. The only difference is that in the first one the theme is in 8-bit. It is remarkable that there is no diagonal line. This means that the two songs are not similar at all. Or the musical parts are all switched up. But there are constant lines which are more highlighted than the others this may mean that they are played in the same key perhaps.

Discussion & Conclusion

We have seen that there are some key differences between Japanese an Western game music. Such as the instrumentalness and the timbre coefficients. There were also key differences in tempo Western music does not have a standard tempo but seems to cluster around 120 BPM and 85 BPM. While the mean of Japanese music is around 120 BPM. Then we looked at individual tracks we compared Japanese games with a Western and Japanese composer and found that there were indeed some similarities. We also looked at two classic from both worlds and discussed the differences in timbre and chroma. Lastly we compared the old and new Mario theme songs and found that they were quite different as there was no line.

Discussion

We did find some key differences between the two categories. But it is was hard when looking at the individual tracks to generalize these conclusions over the whole category. Also there were only 50 tracks used of each category due to the speed of computability, so it might be premature to draw any conclusions.